Research is health care

When the public discusses the challenges facing health care systems and even academic medical centers, most people leap to topics in clinical care. Access, wait times, costs, billing, insurance company approvals, all of these and more are more prominent in public discussion. It makes sense. These topics are more directly relevant to people’s daily lives and to their immediate physical and economic health. These same concerns can even seem to get outsized attention even within a health system, especially as costs increase more rapidly than reimbursement rates. That simple imbalance makes solving the problems that dominate the public conversation even more challenging. But there is an area within health care that does not get discussed as much by the public but is just as vital and relevant to these same problems noted above.

Of course I’m talking about research. I know I do not need to explain its importance to health care to this audience. Without academic medical research there are no new therapeutics, devices, procedures, or even improvements on those already in use. Clinical and translational research is the end point of sometimes decades of basic research to better understand biology, from the systemic down to the subatomic level. What reaches the bedside starts at the bench. Discoveries, particularly those that occur in academic medical research centers, are fundamental to every new “miracle” medicine. This is not news.

Just as in clinical care, medical research faces a host of drags on momentum unlike those it has faced in decades past. The sources of those drags are similarly apparent. Reductions and reprioritizations in funding from government agencies, as well as from industry, result in consolidation of projects under larger program banners. And with fewer physician-scientists in training, competition in recruitment also benefits medical centers with deeper wells of resources. As challenging as this current moment is—competing for less against those who already have more—I believe that research still exists in a world where the best ideas can rise above name-brand associations, can still find success with the smaller kid on the block. Results are still king and collaboration, even absent an immediate profit incentive, is still prized by most.

Collaboration is where Iowa has always had an advantage. Next month, leadership in the college will host a research retreat to discuss many of these issues as well as others brought up by a questionnaire recently circulated among faculty. I look forward to participating in this conversation and am grateful to those members of the department who accepted invitations to join me. I think it is good that the college is bringing together so many of us from across departments. Our way forward must be multidisciplinary and coordinated. Just a couple days before this retreat takes place, on June 11 at noon, I will provide the next Quarterly Department Update. I hope you will attend and provide me with more questions and your perspectives that I can take to this retreat.

I am confident that our size and our culture better enable us to find novel solutions through teamwork. We can find ways to better support existing work already being conducted here as well as to expand our work in creative ways that use our talents to their best advantage. In addition to building on our existing foundations, some of our growth will also come through recruitment. For example, two new researchers will join our Pulmonary division in July. The first, Dr. Abbie Begnaud, comes to us from Minnesota, and Dr. Toru Nyunoya will join us from University of Pittsburgh. Both Dr. Begnaud’s work in lung cancer screening, smoking cessation, and community engagement, and Dr. Nyunoya’s work in COPD pathogenesis and smoking-induced lung injury will dovetail nicely with our current pulmonary faculty’s expertise, while also offering paths for expansion.

We have also been joined by several faculty members in the last couple years whose capacity for innovation and collaboration is already beginning to bear out. I asked three of them if I could say more about their work in this space. I think these three are representative of the phenotype of researcher we look to add to our roster at Iowa, both in their sourcing of funding as well as their openness to working outside traditional silos.

Gulsen Ozen, MD, is a clinical assistant professor in Immunology who joined the University of Iowa in 2024. Her research, supported by recent grants from the Rheumatology Research Foundation and the National Scleroderma Foundation, focuses on systemic sclerosis, a rare but the deadliest autoimmune disease. Given the low genetic contribution to this condition and its associations with cancer, she investigates geographic patterns, complications, and cancer associations of systemic sclerosis across the United States using large national databases. Her work aims to better understand environmental and healthcare factors that contribute to disease development and outcomes.

Christina Cho, PhD, joined us in 2025 as an assistant professor in the Division of Hematology, Oncology, and Blood & Marrow Transplantation. Her lab focuses on defining mechanisms of tumor immune evasion and identifying next-generation immunotherapy targets across solid tumors, with current work spanning soluble mediators in melanoma immune evasion, novel immune modulators in non-small cell lung cancer, predictive biomarkers in melanoma, and the relationship between immune senescence and early-onset cancer. The list of her collaborators in both the department, the college, and other colleges is already extensive. Several funded translational efforts are underway including biologic delivery platforms for peritoneal carcinomatosis, studies of radiation-induced valvular heart disease, and mechanisms of immune dysfunction in extramedullary acute myeloid leukemia. 

Ryan Peterson, PhD, also joined us in 2025 as an associate professor in Infectious Diseases. He has submitted an R01 entitled “Human-Centered Statistical Learning” to develop new “glassbox” statistical modeling methodology across cardiovascular and infectious disease domains. The proposal leverages a new cross-collegiate collaboration consisting of faculty across Internal Medicine, Biostatistics, and Computer Science.  He has also been awarded a CTSA-funded pilot grant to develop new data visualization methods called “co-radar plots” in the context of the Heart and Estrogen Replacement Therapy Study. These plots help to conceptualize and communicate multi-dimensional data and statistical results when some variables are highly correlated. On a third front, he’s building the “Data2Science Bridge,” which aims to make big health data sets more accessible for team science collaboration and research.